GroupTalent’s Hiring Marketplace Now Automatically Matches People With Jobs

Talent drain? That’s what they’re saying. The explosion of early stage startups has made it harder for companies to find the best engineers and designers because everyone’s trying to do their own startup. GroupTalent (a startup, of course) wants to be the solution for that.

In an effort to make the process of finding work even less painful than before, today the company is launching a newly revamped website which introduces a matching algorithm that automatically pairs projects and talent together.

GroupTalent doesn’t want to be considered as just another job board or hiring marketplace. Unlike oDesk or Elance, where there’s more emphasis on catering to employers looking for freelancers, at GroupTalent, there’s more of a focus on the talent itself. Most of the startup’s market comes from early stage founders who are looking for gigs to help them extend their runway, says Manuel Medina, GroupTalent CEO.

“The majority of our talent base are teams from startups who are bootstrapping,” he says. “Many are funded, many are from accelerator programs such as YC, TechStars, 500 Startups, and then there are those who are just getting started. Most of them are tired of ramen.”

In other words, just because it’s increasingly hard to recruit someone talented willing to work full-time, that doesn’t mean there aren’t talented folks willing to work.

The biggest difference between GroupTalent and other job boards is the curation aspect to the service. Only 20% of all applicants get in, as the company denies those it doesn’t believe meets a certain quality bar. This filtering process is currently done through manual review in combination with some algorithms that rank the applicants based on open source contributions.

To date, GroupTalent has received applications from over 500 developers and designers from 300 teams who have completed $200,0000 worth of projects. Typically, projects submitted range from $10,000 to $100,000.

With today’s addition of the automatic job-matching feature, the company is able to match projects with talent who already know their way around a given problem space.

For now, explains Medina, “the demographic that we’ve found gravitating to our service early on is other startups who want a specialist to knock out an entire app,” he says. “In the future, we believe a good customer segment for us will be larger companies who want to bring in experienced developers to move quickly and build out an idea in the fraction of the time an internal team would take. Sort of startups-for-hire.”